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Music festivals have become more and more popular in the past decade. From SXSW in Texas, to the rebirth of Lollapalooza, to the myriad of others that have sprung up. As the weather turns nice in the Spring months, tons of people take to the outdoors to enjoy music and fun in a festive atmosphere.

Most of these take place in a large outdoor area, and prepping this type of area takes a special amount of consideration. It pulls in different areas of expertise, including public health, sanitation, botanists and arborists, as well as entertainment experts.

Land Preparation - Tree Removal and Arborists

One of the first steps towards a successful music festival is getting the land prepared for thousands of people to come marching through. This includes many different aspects, including selective tree removal, land clearance.

Getting a licensed tree service is a crucial first step to this, it is important to get the experienced experts when dealing with arboreal aspects of the music festival. They not only provide the equipment and service necessary, but can also provide advice and design input.

Sanitation Issues

Anybody who has been at an outdoor music festival for more than a few hours will know of the one crucial element that they all need, i.e. bathrooms! If you do not have buildings nearby with adequate facilities (and sometimes even if you do!) you will need to employ portable toilets. These can be rented by many different waste management and sewage management companies and come under some recognizable names as Porto-potty and Porto-John.

When it comes to planning for these things, you should include 1 facilities for every 50 people. So if your festival is meant to have 1000 people, you should have 20 portable facilites on hand. Failure to reach this number will get you long lines and unfortunate "accidents", especially when you have alcoholic beverages on hand.

The Entertainment Itself

Finally you have the actual entertainment/music aspect of the music festival. For this you will need to bring an experienced audio management company. While each performer will likely have their own equipment, the management company will help to set up all the infrastructure (including stages, lighting, electrical wiring, etc). Without this it will likely be impossible to have a show at all.

An experienced company is crucial here. Inexperience in this area, especially electrical wiring, can have dire consequences, even resulting in physical harm. For instance, in an outdoor setting it is often likely that rain will occur at least once during a multiday festival. How does your equipment handle this? What about strong winds? These types of considerations are the types of things that an knowledgeable management company will know how to deal with.

Conclusion

Obviously running a large music festival is very complex, and the above points make up just a portion of the issues that will come up. Nonetheless, these 3 main points are a very important part of things and need to be handled with special care and consideration. If you are planning on being part of a music festival, make sure to take this advice into account!

Branding in the music business is as essential as any other business sector. The music industry has a lot of artists with unique abilities and stellar performance that can make it hard for any ordinary musician to make his/her way to stardom. Branding your music business can revolutionize your career by widening not only your audience but your music niche as well.

Musical giants like Lady Gaga and Nicki Minaj have been able to stand out in music industries due to their elaborate dressing mode. This mode of branding has set them apart from other musicians that are struggling to reach the top. Here are a few tips that can get you started with branding in the music industry.

Set up your musical identity

Branding in the music industry might be more important than other industries.

Dressing yourself up like other successful musicians not only makes you unidentifiable but unoriginal as well. What you ought to do is create a brand for yourself. For instance, the late Michael Jackson was widely recognized as the king of pop, Avril Lavigne as the punk princess, while Lil Wayne is considered the king of rap/hip hop. These musicians created their musical niche, got focused and rose above the rest. Create your musical identity and hold on to it until you can be identified with it.

Know your audience

Who is your music directed to? Is it directed to punk lovers, male or females fan, rock, R & B or pop lovers? You must choose your music wisely; work on it until it catches up before you can explore other genres. As a plus, always inject your personality into your music for it to click otherwise your efforts will flop terribly.

The name and color of your band

This feature is widely used by companies while marketing their name to its clients. Your musical band name and color should be simple and easy to memorize. Ensure to use the same colors and fonts during promotions for easy identification by your fans.

Don’t overlook collaborations

In the current world, collaborations are regarded as a phenomenal marketing technique to widen a musician’s fan base. A once little-known Ariana Grande from Nickelodeon’s Victorious rose to fame after her collaboration with Big Sean, a widely known rapper. Ariana’s songs became known as they topped the Billboards in 2014.

Collaborations can provide a musician an avenue to explore other music genres. By featuring in other musician’s song or singing a particular verse, you can gain credibility and tap into a genre that would have considered unlike you. You can consult a professional branding agency like The Branding Division, which can help with all of the above plus some additional networking. This means gaining access to opposing markets. Therefore, make use of the starring influence of other musicians to market yourself-not all of them are rivals.

Establish online presence

Do not ignore the power of online marketing. Music is supposed to be heard beyond the border lines, and this can only be possible by placing your songs in online platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and even your own website. Placing your music on online platforms can help you to speed up branding your music. Ensure to use similar colors and logos to help your fans identify you easily.

Flip Music Education Festival is happy to be celebrating the hardworking educators around the globe. Whether they have a focus on the music, arts or sciences, teachers and educators are what strengthen our younger generation, and for that we thank them. The impact these wonderful people have on our society is immeasurable, and we hope that no one forgets that.

We wanted to put together this festival to spread awareness of the need for music education funding around the globe. With budget's tightening and layoffs happening around the world, the first programs to get cut are ones related to music. It is simply not seen as a priority in our children's education, and that is a shame. We believe it is wrong-headed to eliminate music from the culture of our children. Music teaches us so much about live and the world around us, eliminating that from our curriculum is a shame, and does significant harm to our young minds and future musicians.

There have been previous virtuous endeavors to save music programs in schools, including the famous Save The Music from VH1. These were tremendously effective in their efforts and campaigns to raise awareness, raise money, and provide supplementary programs for music education and orchestral programs for thousands of schools in the USA and around the globe.

Sadly, however, these programs are not as active as they used to be. That is why we at Flip have put together our initiatives. No generation should be faced with budget cuts slashing a schools funds for music, orchestra, choir and music theory. It is just not right, and we are going to do something about it!

Thanks for reading this. It is truly the first step in supporting music programs across the globe. You can take a look at our "Save Local Music Programs" page if you want to support a local initiative right now. We are underway putting together our funding and support infrastructure, and will be updating everyone (via list blog and our e-mail list) when we are ready to launch fully.

Edit: 2/10/2015

Special thanks to Dionne Warwick and her staff for the generous outpouring of support. We have been lifelong fans of hers and to be able to work with her towards our goals has been an amazing experience for us. Best Wishes, Dionne!

This will be a little bit of a rant, so I apologize in advance for any harsh opinions you are about to read. I just need to get a little something off my chest.

I've been hearing a lot lately about how school music programs are "nice", are "good", but aren't "core", aren't "required", and aren't "necessary" for a proper upbringing of a child. This makes me feel angry and sad.

I feel angry because it shows the absolute ignorance of these bloviating ignoramuses. The fact that they put so little value on an entire field of study, simply because they don't understand it or aren't musicians themselves, angers me to the core! These people have no knowledge and no expertise and it's obvious they haven't endeavored to investigate their statements or opinions at all! If you talk to ANY expert on the matter you will soon find that a balanced educational program is key to any curriculum, this includes both the ARTS and the SCIENCES. They are absolutely NECESSARY!

I also feel sad. I pity these poor folks that they haven't experienced the joy and power that having artistic endeavor, initiative and knowledge can bring to a person. There is a pure rush of excitement that I experience, and I know many other musicians experience, from both performing their art and teaching their art. For someone to be so vacant of these experiences that they can blabber ignorant attacks upon an art form is absolutely pitiful. And I do pity them, tremendously.

So it's not all anger, it's also a say sympathy for these poor folk. Imagine if someone attacked history or sociology, or philosophy or physics, as being "unnecessary", it would spark much more outrage. This is another level of atrocious that I think is completely under-represented in our media coverage today.

Ok, I'm calm now. I was all worked up in a tiff about this, but writing this little rant has definitely helped, so let me take another look in a more calm and structured manner:

Arts and Sciences Are Two Sides of the Same Coin

There is a reason the entire academic structure is based on "Arts" and "Sciences", you can either pursue degree in one or the other. Millenia of academic pursuit has given us these classifications. It is because these two segments contain essentially the entirety of human knowledge. They are equivalent pursuits, both sides of the same coin.

Is learning to play guitar any different from learning to do calculus? Some would say it is harder to play a musical instrument! So why do we degrade one while propping up another? When you attack one, or part of one, as being irrelevant, you are essentially attacking the entirety of human knowledge. Why is it acceptable to do this? It should not be. It should be deplorable. IT IS DEPLORABLE. Ok, sorry for yelling. I'm calm. I swear.

The arts have given us so much. I think because people don't see the arts as contributing to technology (in recent years, anyway) that they think they are a trivial pursuit. Not at all. Look at the most popular media of our age, movies, TV, music, all the product of artistic and creative people. Sure, scientists gave us the television and the film projector, but artists gave us the films that made them so popular! Scientists gave us the compact disk and the iPod, but musicians gave use what them them so popular! Without arts, science fails. Without science, art fails. We are all in the same boat!

So there goes my little rant. I hope I didn't scare anyone off 🙂 Just know that we need both academic pursuits in our lives and the lives of our children.

Book Signing & Display: Tchaikovsky
Barry JC Purves is an Oscar and BAFTA nominated Animator and Director, his work is acclaimed internationally and has won many awards, and we will get the opportunity to see some of his work on display in the form of a puppet called “Tchaikovsky”, alongside of books which will be available to purchase. After: How to Create A Great Show reel on Friday 28th October, 11am.

Display: Cosgrove Hall – Storyboards & Concept Art
Alan Case, previously worked with Cosgrove Hall as storyboard/concept artist and character designer, and has kindly leant his work to be displayed during the festival this will consist of Danger Mouse and Count Duckula Storyboards and Character designs.

Book Signing & Display: Setting the Scene
Ahead of the 2Discussion Panel, Saturday 29th, 7.30pm, you will be able to catch Fraser McLean, 2D VFX Animator, Editor, Lecturer, Author (Walt Disney), will be bringing copies of his brand new book, “Setting the Scene” which is being published by Chronicle, as we speak. And if we’re very lucky there will be book available to buy at the festival.

Display: Sketchbooks & Artworks
Tori Davis, 2D Visual Development And Environment Designer (Blue Sky, Walt Disney, DreamWorks), and whose recent works include “Frankenweenie” illustrations for Tim Burton, will be exhibiting a collection of illustrative works ranging from feature film productions such as Blue Skies’ “Rio” to sketchbook doodles and own personal projects some of which can be viewed on her blog www.toricat.blogspot.com

On sale: IMAGINE Magazine
Throughout the whole festival you will be able to pick up a copy of imagine at a discounted rate. Cover price for the autumn edition is £7.99, but festival attendees will be able to get it for just £3.00. The Student Handbook is priced at £9.99 or you can get a special annual subscription deal for £15.00.

What is Flip?

An eclectic mix of educational workshops for young people to experimental animation for grown ups; from industry led panels to feature film screenings and from international showcases and retrospectives of short films to spotlights on animation studios.